Your strategy defines your audience, your platform, your content, and even how you measure success. For example, if you sell a product for a young demographic, you may decide that Instagram is the best place to build your brand by using a series of witty pictures with a strong call to action to make a purchase. Alternatively, you may decide to extend the reach of your brand by attempting to break into a new market, such as building a rapport with women, who comprise a large proportion of Pinterest users. Micro-blogging may be an ideal way to give busy business people the bite-sized content they need on their morning commute, while infographics provide visual punch to make a point instantly.
Network marketing: Network marketing companies have a great business model (for those who own the company), because they only pay their sales people (a.k.a. “independent business owners”) when they make a sale or recruit another person. They only pay on performance. So to sell a bunch of product, the direct sales company really doesn’t go directly to the consumer through TV or magazine ads or similar methods that could easily cost millions; instead they go indirectly through their sales people and only pay for the word of mouth advertising as a commission on a product sale. It’s really savvy business strategy that’s low-risk and high-reward, if it spreads far and fast enough by emotionally exciting the distributors. Distributors are heavily using social media like Facebook, YouTube, blogging and the like to generate sales and grow their network online.
I'm thinking about "less to do" (linking-social media) sites with physical products … Amazon and other merchants. And adding a PPC campaign instead of using social media and constantly toiling away building links and writing articles. Is there an easy way to get sites like this to rank while profiting with some paid traffic? Your opinion on this dilemma .. SEO vs PAID traffic or both would be much appreciated.

When you’re truly faced with the dilemma, “Organic vs. paid search traffic?” don’t get too worked up. There’s always a solution to your specific situation – trust us, we deal with it all of the time! Every business is different and has different goals, so the perfect search marketing mix does exist for your company. First, think about each of these bullet points, and at the end ask yourself, “Am I willing to commit?”

This means that each organic search visit is worth $7.35. Chances are, you’ll spend WAY less than that to generate that one visit. How’s that for some rock-solid ROI? You can get even more specific with this by looking at the organic search traffic for a particular keyword. By extension, you can calculate the ROI of that keyword. You can begin to see how this can ramp up your SEO game.
In December 2009, Google announced it would be using the web search history of all its users in order to populate search results.[32] On June 8, 2010 a new web indexing system called Google Caffeine was announced. Designed to allow users to find news results, forum posts and other content much sooner after publishing than before, Google caffeine was a change to the way Google updated its index in order to make things show up quicker on Google than before. According to Carrie Grimes, the software engineer who announced Caffeine for Google, "Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index..."[33] Google Instant, real-time-search, was introduced in late 2010 in an attempt to make search results more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to increase search rankings. With the growth in popularity of social media sites and blogs the leading engines made changes to their algorithms to allow fresh content to rank quickly within the search results.[34]

It is important to target keywords that your target consumer is likely to search for while looking for the product or service that you offer. For example, if you are an accounting firm located in Miami you would not want to target a general keyword such as “accounting firm.” Not only is it a very difficult keyword, but also you will be attracting visitors from all over the globe. Instead, you would want to target a more precise keyword such as “accounting firm in Miami” or “Miami accounting firm.”

With more and more content being created on Facebook every day, organic reach is steadily declining. That’s why you might want to consider using Facebook’s paid advertising options to promote and increase the reach of your posts. While organic posts only get shown to your own Facebook fans, paid ads allow you to target people who have not liked your page but have similar interests and/or demographics.
Look at the different search engines (sources) that drive traffic to your site to determine where you want to invest your resources. For example, if you're getting an overwhelming amount of visitors and revenue from a particular search engine, that's an obvious source of profitable traffic and an area in which you might want to make further investment; but you might also find another search engine that delivers only a few visitors, but ones who represent a very high Per Visit Value. In this latter case, you might want to increase your spend in that area to drive more of those high-value visitors to your site.
Earlier I touched on using ultimate guides to shift the awareness of the reader to facilitate a conversion. That’s a solid example. Your content can serve any number of goals including sales, lead generation, etc. You could even use it to warm up a cold audience before you expose them to a paid campaign. It can lower your ad costs and increase your click-through rates. The utility of content is endless. You decide.
Within social media, there are a lot of various ways to optimize your targeting organically. While paying for social media marketing can be effective, adjusting the targeting on your posts can boost your organic reach. Within Facebook and Twitter, you can adjust for your posts to target the following criteria: gender, relationship, status, education level, age, location, language, interests, and post end date. With these targeting attributes available, you can better target your audience so the right people can see your content.
Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review. One example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices.[53] Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.[54]
Second thing, optimizing across additional platforms. So we've looked and YouTube and Google Images account for about half of the overall volume that goes to Google web search. So between these two platforms, you've got a significant amount of additional traffic that you can optimize for. Images has actually gotten less aggressive. Right now they've taken away the "view image directly" link so that more people are visiting websites via Google Images. YouTube, obviously, this is a great place to build brand affinity, to build awareness, to create demand, this kind of demand generation to get your content in front of people. So these two are great platforms for that.
This refers to your ability to rank for certain keywords. For instance, say you sell shoes online, you will need to optimize your site, backlinks, website speed and much more so that you can “rank” high for certain keywords that are highly relevant to your business. Relevant keywords may include “buy shoes,” “shoe sale,” “where to buy shoes,” and so on. Once you can rank high (top page) for these keywords, you will enjoy an increase in traffic and business as a result.
Content that ranks well in organic search – and does so for a long time – is particularly hard to out-rank due to the strong, positive signals it sends to the search engines and the subsequent authority it has developed. Gearing content to meet natural search intent is perfect for businesses looking to create a lasting presence and develop authority in relevant topics and/or industries. Focus on evergreen queries, question-based content and topic optimisation (where you look to cover every single facet of a topic) and you will be on your way.
BrightEdge research supports that a blended approach is best for delivering high performing content. Not only will combining organic and paid search increase website traffic, but it will offer a bigger return on the investment. Take Retail, Technology and Hospitality industries, for example — organic and paid search combined make up more than two-thirds of their total revenue.